The Exasperated American
Will the voters channel their furor at this regime of lies
into an unprecedented turnout at the polls in November?
By: Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
May 8, 2022
A large majority of Americans now have no confidence in Joe Biden and his administration, which often polls below 40 percent, with negatives nearing 60 percent.
Despite the 15-month catastrophe of his regime, the level of his unpopularity remains understandable but still remarkable. After all, in 2020 voters already knew well of his cognitive deficits and the radicalism of his agenda. They saw both clearly starting in 2019 and during the 2020 Democratic primaries, the primary debates, and the general election.
So what did Biden’s voters imagine would happen when a cognitively challenged president, controlled by hard-Left subordinates, entered office—other than what he has done?
Now, as then, the media is fused to the progressive agenda and does—and did—its best to turn a non-compos mentis Biden into a bite-your-lip centrist empath in the Bill Clinton “I feel your pain” mode.
The American people know that on every occasion their president speaks, he will slur his words at best. At worst, he will have little idea where he is, where he has been, or what he is supposed to be saying or doing. When he is momentarily cognizant, he is at his meanest, or he simply makes things up.
Our new normal of a mentally incapacitated president is not entirely new in American history—Woodrow Wilson was an invalid during the last months of his presidency. But Wilson’s condition was well hidden. Quite novel is the idea that the American people know the man in the White House is cognitively disabled and simply expect him to confirm that bleak diagnosis each time he opens his mouth.
If Donald Trump exaggerated, Biden flat out lies daily. His most recent untruth was his assertion that the MAGA movement represents “the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history.” Biden cannot really believe that roughly half the country is now more dangerous than Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the Weathermen, the American Nazi Party, the American Communist Party, and the Ku Klux Klan. And this comes from the mythically moderate “good old Joe from Scranton”?
The bullied people also know the Biden problem has no remedy. The 25th Amendment that Democrats and the Left raised nonstop in efforts to remove Trump—from the Rosenstein-McCabe wear-a-wire embarrassment and former Yale psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee’s congressional tomfoolery to the incessant Montreal Cognitive Assessment demands—won’t apply to Biden.
Either the media will continue to rebrand his incapacity as Ciceronian eloquence or it will privately gloat that Kamala Harris is so off-putting, so uninformed, so unpopular that the people would prefer an amnesiac Biden to a nonimpaired Harris. The truth is the three doyens of Democratic progressivism—Joe Biden, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)—all struggle with cognitive decline and rely heavily upon the media and the Democratic Party’s political attack machine to enjoy asymmetrical exemption. (Though, in Feinstein’s case, her support is wavering.)
Americans feel there is no remedy for this downward spiral until November. To get a sense of their dilemma, imagine a Richard Nixon in 1973 caught lying during Watergate but with Spiro Agnew waiting in the wings without a trace of scandal—except with one difference: the current media is now attacking not the president’s shortcomings, but the president’s critics who point them out.
Even if the Republicans were to win a 60-vote majority in the Senate, they would hesitate to impeach Biden simply because Harris is a more frightening prospect. And some Marquess of Queensberry centrist RINOs would not wish to codify the Democrats’ new standard of impeaching an opposition president the minute he loses the House of Representatives in his first midterm.
Most of the country has awakened to the fact that the Trump-Russia collusion story was essentially a Hillary Clinton campaign effort to destroy a political opponent, a presidential transition, and a presidency. And they know Clinton will never be indicted for her conspiracies and racketeering even if her minions rat her out to seek reduced charges for themselves.
That hoax was followed by an impeachment vote over a phone call based on two more lies:
1) the Biden family was neither corrupt nor used Joe Biden’s office as vice president, and his future political career to leverage payments from Ukraine, and
2) Donald Trump canceled military aid to Ukraine rather than sending them critical Javelin anti-tank missiles put on hold by the Obama Administration.
Americans know Google, Facebook, and Twitter censors were all enlisted in the effort to destroy a former president and his outspoken supporters. And they know there is no real remedy unless two or three more enlightened billionaires follow Elon Musk’s lead.
If Roe v. Wade were to be repealed, many Americans in red states will remain appalled that some blue states will allow abortions, especially late-term abortions after 22 weeks. But nearly all will accept the rule of constitutional democracy and thus the states’ rights to make their own laws that do not conflict with federal legislation as passed by Congress and signed by the president.
These red-state citizens know the opposite is certainly not true: blue state officials will do all they can to attack those who disagree with them, who consider abortion the destruction of human life in the womb. Expect more California-style official travel bans.
Americans know that the Department of Homeland Security’s new “Disinformation Governance Board” will, by design, be run by an arch-disinformationist Nina Jankowicz. The board’s entire purpose is to coordinate with the media to brand oppositional expressions as “hate speech” and “mis-, dis-, and mal-information” so that critics preemptively self-censor and moderate their opposition.
In this regard, they know that the Biden regime awards positions of great power in the U.S. government to those who do the very opposite of the intended offices’ purview. The goal is pure nihilism.
Thus, a mythographer and propagandist will adjudicate “truth.” A homeland security secretary will do his best to make the border entirely insecure. The secretary of transportation will see to it that freeways and bridges are not built. The department of energy’s task will be to ensure less energy is produced and its transportation is more expensive and more dangerous than ever. And the secretary of defense will oversee the most humiliating retreat in modern American history in Afghanistan as he cites our chief existential threat to be either climate change or “white supremacists.”
The people know the Left eventually always loses the support of the voters. But leftists still believe they can achieve and retain power, given that they control America’s cultural and informational institutions.
The Left remains hell-bent on radically changing the demography of the United States. And it always manufactures new hysterias—from the claim that Trump was “100 percent responsible” for every American death during the COVID-19 pandemic, to border officers “whipping” innocent illegal aliens, to Vladimir Putin single-handedly causing sky-high gas prices and the worst inflation since the 1970s. Each week brings another prairie fire hysteria. No sooner than it is exposed and refuted, and the Left is on to another conflagration.
Americans have a rough idea that the tragic death of George Floyd was not proof of an epidemic of lethal police shootings of black males. Yet that single death set off the entire woke conflagration of 2020 and, with the hysterias of the lockdowns, has nearly wrecked the country.
Yet in 2021, out of more than 10 million arrests in the United States, police shot about six unarmed black men. The same year, 346 police officers were shot, 63 fatally—to left-wing indifference. Moreover, roughly 8,000 blacks were murdered mostly by other blacks—to callous media and political silence. Thousands of lost black lives mattered little—except the fewer than 1 in 1,000 of that total who were tragically and lethally shot while unarmed by police.
Finally, Americans were angry at the rioting inside the Capitol on January 6, 2021. But they cannot forgive the needless lies surrounding that illegal act in an effort to fabricate an insurrection out of a spontaneous buffoonish riot.
So they recoil at the lies about Officer Brian Sicknick’s death. They are baffled about the silence surrounding the number of FBI informants among the January 6 protestors. They are angry about the lies surrounding the lethal shooting of an unarmed Ashli Babbitt. They don’t understand the refusal to release all videos or communications pertinent to the government’s reaction to the riot. And they do not fathom the disproportionate treatment of those charged with unlawfully entering the Capitol versus those 14,000 arrested during the summer of 2020 when rioting led to more than 35 deaths, some 1,500 police officer injuries, and $2 billion in property damage and massive looting.
They shake their heads when Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) directly threatened two Supreme Court Justices by name outside the court, ginning up an angry protest group at the doors. They are baffled that the White House press secretary sees nothing wrong with disseminating the private addresses of Justices to ensure mobs of protestors show up at their homes to intimidate them.
Of course, exasperated Americans are furious over the open border. They are angry their lives are being insidiously destroyed by the Biden inflation and energy prices. They are humiliated by the Biden debacle in Afghanistan and angrier still over his spiking crime wave and his mean-spirited senility. They resent Biden’s efforts to blame all these self-inflicted miseries on Donald Trump, or the “Putin price hikes” or the inability of a presidency to do anything about supposedly organic forces beyond his purview.
But behind the popular furor is a sense of impotence in the face of the untruth they are assaulted with day after day. In other words, bullied Americans are angry that people who control the nation’s institutions deliberately mislead them and do so because they hate them.
Let us hope that they channel this historic exasperation in November in a manner we have never seen before in the modern era.
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charliej373May 11
Baby Brother – by Holly CallieBy Charlie JohnstonI have engaged in discussion the last few days with some pro-abortion folks on Twitter. It has been simultaneously frustrating, enlightening and a little heartening. Some friends say it won’t be long before Twitter bans me for some bit of fact they don’t like. We’ll see. The winds of change are blowing there, but the deal has not yet been consummated.The conversation is frustrating because of the enormous amount of logical fallacies, misinformation, ad hominems, and bald assertions masquerading as facts or evidence coming from that side. I linked to a Yahoo News Item (NOT a conservative site) to provide video of hysterical protesters in front of Supreme Court Justices homes and the response from several was a disdainful, “Oh that video is from Fox News.” What?! So prejudiced against Fox News that they will not even look at video proof if it has appeared on the Fox Network?! That approaches invincible ignorance. The only problem that the left can possibly have with Fox is that it is moderately conservative, not that it is inaccurate. Over the last six years, Fox has proven to be far more accurate than CNN, MSNBC and the rest of the establishment media – so the left’s aversion to Fox is just a visceral emotion rather than a considered decision. (I was kind of amused because I have more than a few problems with Fox, myself, but lefties generally don’t get nuance. Their narrative is that conservatives are racist, misogynist, redneck watchers of Fox News and NASCAR races. It is a bigoted caricature rather than an effort to understand any arguments.) While it is frustrating to me, it is crippling to those so afflicted. What you don’t know will, indeed, ultimately hurt you.It gave me a key insight into something that has puzzled me for over a decade. Back when I was doing heavy politics, one of the things I was valued for was my ability to get into the minds of the opponents and figure out what course they would likely take. About a year into the Obama presidency that ability started taking a steep nosedive. I just couldn’t figure out what they were thinking. The thing was that back in the day, most conservatives and most liberals (not all) worked from a set of foundational principles. Their actions would differ based on their interpretive prism – but those actions were in service to their principles, and so they were coherent. Modern leftists (and some conservatives) have appetites – and their principles are only of use in service to their current appetites. That is why a month ago leftists were passionately opining that you had to be a biologist to know what a woman is and that men could get pregnant – while now they passionately opine that you must be a woman to have a say on abortion, at all. Their current appetite changed – and so did their principles. For genuine conservatives (and genuine liberals of 30 years ago) principles are pylons sunk into bedrock to serve as the foundation of the intellectual and philosophical structure they build atop it. For leftists, principles are just gear in their toolbox, to be casually taken up and set aside as their appetites demand. The latter approach is inevitably arbitrary and capricious, without any consistent coherence. This is why I cannot easily predict their course: there is no intellectual foundation on their side from which to work. One simply has to hypothesize where their appetites will take them next. Since their appetites are arbitrary and capricious, that is not as reliable as working with an actual intellectual foundation. One side has malleable actions in service to their principles; the other has malleable ‘principles’ in service to their appetites.Even so, the interactions gave me some heart. Most people simply no longer have the tools they need to do serious critical thinking. This is why so many want to abrogate their responsibility as a free citizen to an ‘expert,’ usually someone as uninformed as they are but with a credential. Philosophy has been seriously impoverished since the Enlightenment 300 years ago. It still bears occasional nuggets of insight, but is largely superficial and shallow – when it does not entirely engage in building castles in the air. Ironically in this age of “reason,” the best philosophy comes from serious theology (though I must concede that some of the worst modern philosophy comes from crackpot theologians). As my friend, Eschatologist Desmond Birch often says, most modern problems are the result of bad philosophy. Add to that the entire collapse of emphasis on evidence, logic and reason in the academy of ‘higher’ and lower learning and you have a whole generation of people who won participation medals without learning or having to seriously strive to actually win much of anything. They come to intellectual debate almost entirely unarmed with any facts or consistent logic. So it is not entirely surprising that they should seek to make every controversy a contest of will and raw, often, violent power. They are incapable of any other sort of discourse.So how can I be heartened? Despite the lack of factual evidence or the needed discipline for logical inquiry, some of them genuinely want to seek the good. They have simply been deprived of the necessary tools to do so with any precision by several generations of deficient – and often malicious – pedagogues. Unless they are gifted auto-didacts, it is unlikely that they can suddenly develop clear, consistent, and precise ways of thinking to build a solid foundation of coherent principles, either conservative or liberal (NOT leftist – which is profoundly anti-intellectual). Over the years I have had some very warm friendships with bona fide (and even prominent) liberals. Perhaps the most prominent was the late Sen. Adlai Stevenson III. We had some lively, intriguing conversations but that was because we both understood the basic foundational rules of actual facts, evidence and consistent logic. That can no longer be assumed. One time, I was charged with briefing a colleague who was going to meet with a prominent public figure who had been mixed and muddled on the issue of abortion. Suddenly it dawned on me that what my colleague should do was to focus on the basics – that we in the pro-life movement often assumed others to have far more basic knowledge on the subject than they actually do. My friend thought that was an inspired idea – and went with it. After the meeting, he called me and told me with some astonishment that he thought we had a real convert. Turns out the public figure had a top advisor with him, who confirmed all the factual information. The man got mad midway through – not at my colleague, but that he had been played for so long. So I think it may well be time to go back to some basics and fundamentals – not just making our case, but explaining the basis on which we come to it. There are some people we can never reach. They live like an exposed nerve and get some weird excitement out of raging all the time, even at the price of constant misery. A good chunk of those we can reach will still disagree, but will at least do so on more solid intellectual ground and tone down the desperate emotional angst. But some, given the tools for critical, rational thinking, will have a genuine conversion experience like the public figure I mentioned. I am not too naive, I don’t think. Certainly, the majority of the left love their ad hominems and non sequiturs, thinking it brilliant when it doesn’t even rise to the level of rank sophistry. But there is a small remnant of people there who want to find the good and live it rather than just slavishly work to protect their own perceived privilege and power.Since most of the discussions I reference have happened on Twitter – where it is difficult to make a sustained and nuanced discussion of any depth, I am going to apply the technique to the issue of abortion next. This is just a cursory examination – but it is a start.********* The only question that matters in the abortion debate is whether or not the fetus is a human person. If he is, he is entitled to the rights that all other persons are. If not, he is not entitled to any of the rights other persons are. Until that question is answered, everything else is a distraction and a deflection.Both science and orthodox Christian theology are in lockstep that the fetus IS a fully human person at an early stage of development. A very few avant-garde philosophers disagree, but they get into some very strange corners – such as 
ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 
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